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''Executive Action'' is a 1973 film about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, written by Dalton Trumbo, Mark Lane, and Donald Freed and directed by David Miller. Miller had previously worked with Trumbo on his film ''Lonely Are the Brave'' (1962). It stars Burt Lancaster and, in his final film, Robert Ryan. Donald Sutherland has been credited as having the idea for the film and for hiring Lane and Freed to write the screenplay. Sutherland planned to act in and produce ''Executive Action''; however, he abandoned the project and took a role in another film after failing to obtain financing for the film.〔 ==Plot== A narrator states that when President Lyndon Johnson was asked about the Kennedy Assassination and the Warren Commission report, he said he doubted the findings of the Commission. The narration ends with the mention that the segment did not run on television and was cut from a program about Johnson. The narration does not actually include the quote: "Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first." At a gathering in June 1963, shadowy industrial, political and former US intelligence figures discuss their growing dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration. In the plush surroundings of lead conspirator Robert Foster (Robert Ryan), he and the others try to persuade Harold Ferguson (Will Geer), a powerful oil magnate, to back their plans for an assassination of Kennedy. He remains unconvinced, saying, "I don't like such schemes. They're only tolerable when necessary, and only permissible when they work." James Farrington (Burt Lancaster), a black ops specialist, is also among the group: He shows Ferguson and others that a careful assassination of a U.S. President can be done under certain conditions, and refers to the murders of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley as examples. He calls this "executive action". In a desert, a shooting team is doing target practice at a moving object. One of the shooters says they can only guarantee the operation's success by slowing down the target to 15 miles per hour. The lead conspirators, Farrington and Foster, discuss preparations for the assassination. Obtaining Ferguson's approval is crucial to the conspirators, although Farrington proceeds to organize two shooting teams in anticipation that Ferguson will change his mind. Ferguson, meanwhile, watches news reports and becomes highly concerned at Kennedy's increasingly "liberal" direction: action on civil rights, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, nuclear disarmament. The deciding moment comes when he's watching an anti-Kennedy news report on the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. It is followed by Kennedy's October 1963 decision ((National Security Action Memorandum #263, Oct. 11 )) to withdraw all US advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1965, effectively ending America's direct involvement in the Vietnam War. Ferguson tells Foster he now supports their project. While the motives of the man in the white suit are clear, the film attempts to cast light on the murky paranoid fears of the conspirators through dialogues between Foster and Farrington. They are primarily concerned about the future of America and the security of ruling-class white people around the world. Foster forecasts the population of the third world in 2000 at 7 billion, "Most of them yellow, brown or black. All hungry and all determined to love; they'll swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and America." He sees Vietnam as an opportunity to control the developing world and reduce its population to 550 million: "I've seen the data," says Foster, adding that they can then apply the same "birth-control" methods to unwanted groups in the US: poor whites, blacks and Latinos. The scene of the shooting is well described. As news of the assassination reaches the conspirators, they describe the effects. Farrington and his assistant discuss the fallout from the assassination, especially how to deal with the fact that Oswald has survived. Farrington contacts nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Ruby stalks and kills Oswald. While the real assassins leave Dallas the conspirators work to cover up their handiwork. They discuss the political fallout in Washington, D.C., concerned about retribution from Robert F. Kennedy and the "believability" of the plot. One states that "Bobby Kennedy is not thinking as Attorney General but as a grieving brother. By the time he recovers it will be too late." The conspirators agree that people will believe in the story because "they want to believe the story." Soon after Farrington's assistant calls one of the conspirators, Farrington has died of a heart attack at "Parkland Hospital." The conspirators are now insulated from the link to the group that committed the killings. Their work is not quite finished. A photo collage is shown of 18 witnesses, all but two of whom died from unnatural causes within three years of the assassination. A voice-over says that an actuary of the British newspaper ''The Sunday Times'' calculated the probability that all these people who witnessed the assassination would die within that period of time to be 100,000 trillion to one.〔The number given in ''The Sunday Times'' article on February 26, 1967 was in fact 100,000 trillion to one. In response to a request by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 for a copy of the actuarial study, the legal manager for the ''Times'' replied that the article was "based on a careless journalistic mistake and should not have been published. This was realized by ''The Sunday Times'' editorial staff after the first edition — the one which goes to the United States and which I believe you have — had gone out, and later editions were amended … We asked (actuary ) the wrong question … what were the odds against fifteen named people out of the population of the United States dying within a short period of time … (of ) the odds against fifteen of those included in the Warren Commission index dying within a given period," which they said would have been "much lower." (HSCA Hearings ), vol. 4, p. 463–465. Robert M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, estimated that the odds of 15 people out of 2,479 in the Warren Commission index dying within a three-year period, assuming a median age of 40, would be 98.16 percent, or one out of 1.2. Assuming a median age of 35, the number would be 57.09 percent, or one out of 1.75. Vincent Bugliosi, ''Reclaiming History'' (2007), p. 1013–14.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Executive Action (film)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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